Montgomery Bell v. James Morrison Anthony Butler and Jonathan Taylor’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

48 federal appellate · 24 district · 111 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 264 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““If the bar is sought to be removed by the proof of a new promise,. that promise as a new cause of action ought to be proved in a clear and explicit manner, and be in its terms unequivocal and determinate. * * * If the expressions be equivocal, vague, and indeterminate, leading to no certain conclusion, but at best to probable inferences, which may affect different minds in different ways, we think they ought not to go to a jury as evidence of a new promise to revive the cause of action.””

   12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Shepherd v. Thompson · Londrigan v. Federal Bureau of Investigation

2. ““Now it would seem, that a distinct and an unequivocal acknowledgment of the indebtment, after the statute had run, should remove the bar and give legal force to the demand. But the current of decisions in our courts is that the acknowledgment does not revive the original cause of action, but is the foundation of a promise on which an action may be sustained. In the case of Bell v. Morrison, 1 Pet. (26 U. S.) [351] 355 [ 7 L. Ed. 174 ], this subject was considered at great length, and the court say: ‘There is some confusion in the language of the books, resulting from a want of strict attention to the distinctions here indicated. It is often said that an acknowledgment revives the promise, when it is meant, that it revives the debt or cause of action. The revival of a debt supposes that it has been once extinct and gone; that there has been a period in which it had lost its legal use and vitality. The act which revives it, is what essentially constitutes its new being, and is inseparable from it. It stands not by its original force, but by the new promise, which imparts validity to it. Proof of the latter is indispensable to raise the assumpsit on which the action can be maintained. It was this view of the matter which first created the doubt, whether it was not necessary that a new consideration should be proved to support the promise, since the old consideration was gone. The doubt has been overcome; and it is now held, that the original consideration is sufficient, if reco”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. John W. Masury & Son v. Bisbee Lumber Co.

3. ““The question is not, however, as to the authority of a partner after the dissolution to adjust an admitted and subsisting debt; we mean admitted by the whole partnership or unbarred by the statute; but whether he can, by his sole act, after the action is barred by lapse of time, revive it against all the partners, without any new authority communicated to him for this purpose.” 26 U.S. at 371 , 7 L.Ed. at 183 (emphasis added).”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 304 F. Supp. 599 - Adelman v. United States